A Place to Stand

Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Saturday, April 16, 2011

David Cameron has been reported as promising that "The Government is doing everything it can to drive growth in the UK economy" and "the Government planned to invest in the "industries of the future" such as aerospace, pharmaceuticals and green energy" so unless Mr Cameron has some actual evidence that prizes are less effective than normal grant giving we are going to have an X-Prize foundation.

I am therefore formally asking you what evidence, if any, you have that, on the balance of probability, a prize system would always be a less efficient way of "doing everything" to promote growth than conventional grant giving. If there is no such evidence the above promise clearly commits you to establishing a genuine X-Prize foundation as quickly as can be done to promote aerospace & pharmaceuticals. I would also advise biotech. The Saltire Prize in Scotland is already working for Green industry.

The Freedom of Information Act requires that government answer within 20 days. This means working days so normally 28 real days.

I repeated the request on 11th February, 23rd Feb, 24th Feb, 4th March and 11th March before contacting the Information Commissioner's Office asking them to act. They sent the Cabinet Office a letter on 19th March. 28 days later, 14th April I got the reply.

"We do not have a record of receiving your original request....

Your request has been handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. This provides the requestor with an access right to recorded information...

We do not hold recorded information in relation to this request.

Not any recorded instance of anybody, ever, considering any such innovation regarding prize giving then? In a civil service that writes memos on everything! At least everything they wouldn't be embarrassed to see later.

"Ministers will be developing detailed plans to turn this strategy into action. Everything – from bank lending to skills, green tech to high tech, competition to innovation, international trade to local growth – will be put under the microscope. That forensic, relentless focus on growth is what you will get from this government. What I need in return from you is a commitment to create and innovate; to invest and grow; to develop and break boundaries."

No such consideration has ever been made. None whatsoever. We have that on authority.

Therefore there was no trace of honesty in Cameron's promise. None whatsoever.

Therefore there are no circumstances under which any statement of Cameron's can ever be assumed to be truthful or coming from the mouth of somebody who possesses the smallest possible trace of honesty. None whatsoever.

I will now be doing an FoI to the Cabinet Office to determine what proportion of emails, to the best of their knowledge or if necessary estimation, containing FoI requests go missing. The odds that they have not deliberately broken the law by destroying what they describe as "my request" but was actually my 6 requests will be that figure to the power 6. That will be the odds that the Cabinet Office and Cameron have not deliberately broken the law to prevent people knowing what is going on.

I will also be contacting the Science minister, David "two brains" Willett to find out who decided to give absolutely no consideration to the X-Prize concept I was asked to submit to the Space Centre and what reason was given for doing so. Since it would have involved taking money undeniably overwhelmingly wasted by European bureaucrats one reason could be enthusiasm for "ever closer" European bureaucracy. We will seeif there is another reason.

Looking back on it the sole occasion I know of in which Cameron has kept a promise to do something in a speech he made, from the "cast iron" promise of referendum, through the "made me physically sick" promise to do something about the EU giving prisoners votes to the current immigration one, was his leadership promise to take the Conservatives out of their pro-EU group in Brussels. Even that one was delayed and delayed and had to be dragged out of him by those fooled into voting for him.

Even today a politician who is wholly, completely and totally dishonest is clearly unfit for any role in public life or in any remotely honest party.

Perhaps, in comments, somebody can name a single other such promise he has kept. I will send this to Cameron and some of his cabinet and party so if anybody can....

Friday, April 15, 2011

This letter is in the Scotsman today, based on my post here. This is the full version. The bits in bold were edited out. Normally the Scotsman editing is pretty good and I have praised them for improving my letters in the past but this has been edited into near incomprehensibility.

Havingseen {After seeing}the coverage of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight may I say how depressing I found it that virtually none of it was forward looking. A week ago SpaceX announced that in 2013 or early 2014 they would launch into orbit the equivalent of more than the maximum take-off weight of a fully-loaded [a] Boeing 737-200 with 136 passengers.[while] Falcon Heavy can deliver the equivalent of an entire commercial airplane full of passengers, crew, luggage and fuel all the way to orbit. This is not quite matching the growth in air travel by the 50th anniversary of the Wright Brothers, when daily commercial air travel of about that size already existed but neither is it that far.

To be fair when the Wright Brothers first flew the press then took a long time to actually report it so a tradition is being maintained

In particular running 2 sentences together by inserting "while" is just crass - that means they are saying it is a different event rather than more detail of the same one. The editing may have been done by someone cutting it to fit limited space This is suggested by the fact that the title the Scotsman have given it is "Wright Tradition" but my reference to the Wright Brothers has been excised making their chosen heading meaningless, The letter went out to all and sundry. Google News currently does not show anybody else publishing it but if anybody sees it please let me know.

Which was clearly an attempt to give themselves an alibi when they do go out. Scottish Renewables is a propaganda organisation for windmill subsidies funded by the government and the subsidy receivers. If even they say using windmills to provide baseload means the lights will go out you can take it to the bank. A rule of politics being that while people lie to help themselves nobody ever lies for the purpose of making themselves look worse.

Using windmills to provide baseload, after destroying 80% of all our current power is what the SNP are promising to do. Clearly they have had advice that this is clinically insane, not just from engineers but even from their eco-fascist propaganda hirelings. There is no slightest possibility they do not know that they are destroying the economy and killing thousands, probably 10s of thousands, of pensioners.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

They aren't the top 25 at all they are the 25 the BBC selected as officially acceptable. I sent this letter to all and sundry but it seems not to have been published. The BBC, according to internal polling, provides the large majority of news to 82% of the Scottish people.

This poll shows how wholly corrupt the BBC are and how their propaganda lies control us at every level.

The BBC choose the list of "top issues" here and there are many methods by which pollsters may influence the results they get.

Back when Jack McConnell was running things he repeatedly promised that fixing the economy was his "number one priority". Though admittedly he never tried to do anything he clearly knew it was the number one priority with the voters. The BBC have not even allowed it on their "top 25" list.
Another example is that they have asked about replacing nuclear with windmills, the policy of the SNP. LibDims and Greens, which comes far down the list, but not offered us "building more nuclear plants" (absolutely necessary if we wish to keep the lights on). Building more plants is, tepidly, the policy of Labour and Tories and enthusiastically the policy of UKIP.

New nuclear is pretty much the only thing on which the Lab/Nat/Con/Dem/Greens do not agree in this election but the BBC have decided that it, along with actually trying to make our economy grow, simply isn't a discussible issue. No wonder this election seems as grey as any Soviet one.

The only party which has shown any individuality is UKIP, a party which across the UK nearly matches the LibDems, is currently ahead of them in Wales and far ahead in London. Yet the BBC have had the arrogance to airbrush them out of Scotland's choices and off the air.

The BBC openly censors on almost every subject and overwhelmingly pushes some (e.g. the EU and "catastrophic warming". Such politically directed control of the media is wholly incompatible with true democracy.

The "number 1" issue in Scottish politics is, if the BBC are not lying and censoring in the fascist cause, cutting cancer hospital waiting lists. This is like being in favour of motherhood and apple pie. Who stands for longer cancer lists?

On the other hand we have just had the SNP's manifesto and a genuine policy gap has opened up. Currently the other Holyrood parties have shown themselves clinically insane by calling for the destruction of 58% of our electric power. The SNP were beyond clinically insane in calling for an 80% reduction in the use of fire to produce power (ie burning carbon) as well as ending all nuclear. Now they have reached a level of drooling insanity for which English has not previously had a word, by calling for ending of the use of fire for this by 100%.

Hydro and windmills amount to 20% of our electricity use. Hydro being just over half that. Hydro cannot be significantly increased because all the good spots (with a lot of water and a major fall) are in use. Windmills are useless even at 10%of power we are risking it destabilising the grid, because wind speeds and the energy they produce vary by the second. For that reason windmills couldn't be significantly increased even if we wanted to. Even Scottish Renewables have acknowledged that windmills cannot provide baseload for that reason and because in certain cold weather conditions wind is reduced to about 0.2% of the grid so even their eco-fascist friends must acknowledge that removing all the baseload power is to commit mass murder of pensioners and the vulnerable.

The SNP. like the Greens are therefore committed to removing 80% of our electricity, which in turn means destroying 80% of our national wealth. Worse that that this will mean 90% during winter freezes. That means killing 10s of thousands of pensioners annually and making Scotland virtually uninhabitable during the winter months.

If they are not more insane than history suggests it is possible to be the the SNP and Greens are quite deliberate liars, thieves, murderers and traitors trying to destroy this country to profit their friends/donor sin the eco industries.

I have long been concerned at leaders of the "environmental" movement refusing to acknowledge that the most glaring errors or untruths could be in any way wrong. We see no apologies for decades of false anti-nuclear scare stories; almost annual predictions of peak oil having been reached over the last 40 years; 200ft, or 20ft sea level rises; massive starvation in the 1980s unless we drastically reduce population; a new ice age by the year 2000 etc. etc.

He is therefore to be commended. Despite some chagrin on my part that he has merely said something which we supporters of human progress have been saying for decades it has taken courage. Whatever the short term profit in false scare stories no long term human achievement can be built on them. We may be seeing the "environmental" movement start to grow up, or maybe just George.

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Somebody I respect suggested I write that letter to the Guardian on his volte face and I went to some lengths to be nice about him. Alas the Guardian not being the even minded free speech loving liberal newspaper it pretends to be did not allow even such supportive criticism to be made. I suspect they must have had many other letters on Mr Monbiot's Damascene conversion but you wouldn't know it from what they publish.

New article from Moonbat completing his volte face on nuclear. I would still like to hear him say when he first heard that the radiation at TMI was far to low to hurt anybody, as he admitted in the last article, and if he intends to apologise to the nuclear industry, who have been saying that for 32 years and of whom in his last article he said "I still hate the liars".

Rats and sinking ships and that is why this is a very good thing.

Neil Craig

Maybe I should stop being so nice about the eco-Nazis. They clearly don't respond to it. Note that in Moonbat's previous article on his turn he tempered by saying "I still loathe the liars who run the nuclear industry" - that being the "liars" who said the Three Mile Island radiation release was minor when George was playing it up as another lying scare story. Well Obviously Moonbat owes the entire nuclear industry a public apology. Also anybody in the eco-Nazi movement who doesn't feel drawn to criticise Moonbat for his anti-nuclear lying cannot object when anybody truthfully refers to the entire Green movement as disgusting obscene, lying, thieving, murdering Nazi parasites without the remotest trace of human decency, every one of whom deserve to be strung up from lampposts or kicked to death down back lanes. While that may be somewhat uncharitable I hope nobody can accuse it of being as non-factual, undeserved or insulting as Moonbat's continuing lies, even after he has moderated his position.. P'm hust to nice about them.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Previously I have discussed here and here the undisputed fact that formal debates (usually teams of 1,2 or 3 members getting about 5 minutes to put or rebut the motion for about 5 minutes each) is historically far more effective at examing indeas; along with the equally undisputed fact that the broadcast media flatly refuse to broadcast such and instead use the word "debate" to cover several people, most of whom, along with the broadcaster's "moderator" share the same view, interrupting anybody they disagree with.

Nobody among official broadcasters is even willing to attempt to defend this. They simply refuse to speak, leaving the inevitable conclusion that they put public interest and even commericial interests far behind censoring democratic debate.

On the other hand newspapers are under considerable financial pressure at the moment, largely because the internet doesn't censor overall and because comments are largely uncensored. Clearly publishing a real debate would be likely to be commercially advantageous. If any newspaper wishes such advantage here is my suggestion> I will forward this to our national and some international Press and if any thank me *
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Select a subject from among the most popular in letters received in the previous week. Advertise the motion to be discussed on Saturday and invite a team of 3, drawn from experts, the "great and good" and/or if they were beinng cheap, letter writers who have shown knowledge. Doing this using mainly the latter would be almost as cheap as running a normal letter column, certainly the cheapest and one of the most popular parts of most papers, Then publish 350/500 words from the first proposer on Monday, 1st opponent on Tuesday and so on till Saturday. Thus everybody gets a chance to put their case and more importantly, from the paper's point of view, they get a captive audience for that week and a strong link towards the next week's. More importantly from society's point of view we get real public discussion of issues which are genuinely important to the people.

The diminutive Gagarin, who stood a mere 5-foot-2, appeared ready to pursue a career as an industrial worker but found his passion for flying while attending technical school. He entered military flight training and earned his pilot’s wings at the controls of a MiG-15.

In 1,000 years time I suspect this will be the only popularly remembered event of the Soviet Union of the period, just as everybody has heard of Leif Ericson but couldn't name the king of Denmark at the time if their life depended on it.

And so to future developments. SpaceX have announced the launch date for their large commercial vehicle.

Elon Musk, CEO and chief rocket designer of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) unveiled the dramatic final specifications and launch date for the Falcon Heavy, the world's largest rocket.

“Falcon Heavy will carry more payload to orbit or escape velocity than any vehicle in history, apart from the Saturn V moon rocket, which was decommissioned after the Apollo program. This opens a new world of capability for both government and commercial space missions,” Musk told a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

“Falcon Heavy will arrive at our Vandenberg, California, launch complex by the end of next year, with liftoff to follow soon thereafter. First launch from our Cape Canaveral launch complex is planned for late 2013 or 2014.”

Musk added that with the ability to carry satellites or interplanetary spacecraft weighing over 53 metric tons or 117,000 pounds to orbit, Falcon Heavy will have more than twice the performance of the Delta IV Heavy, the next most powerful vehicle, which is operated by United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture.

53 metric tons is more than the maximum take-off weight of a fully-loaded Boeing 737-200 with 136 passengers. In other words, Falcon Heavy can deliver the equivalent of an entire commercial airplane full of passengers, crew, luggage and fuel all the way to orbit. Falcon Heavy’s first stage will be made up of three nine-engine cores, which are used as the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle. It will be powered by SpaceX’s upgraded Merlin engines currently being tested at the SpaceX rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas. Falcon Heavy will generate 3.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. This is the equivalent to the thrust of fifteen Boeing 747s taking off at the same time.

Above all, Falcon Heavy has been designed for extreme reliability. Unique safety features of the Falcon 9 are preserved, such as the ability to complete its mission even if multiple engines fail. Like a commercial airliner, each engine is surrounded by a protective shell that contains a worst case situation like fire or a chamber rupture, preventing it from affecting other engines or the vehicle itself....

Falcon Heavy, with more than twice the payload, but less than one third the cost of a Delta IV Heavy, will provide much needed relief to government and commercial budgets. In fact, Falcon Heavy at approximately $1,000 per pound to orbit, sets a new world record in affordable spaceflight.

Going from Gagarin to a 737 equivalent in orbit in 52 years doesn't match the growth in air traffic between the Kitty Hawk launch in Dec 1903 with where air traffic was in 1955 but for the first time it isn't so far behind either.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Last week I had a letter in the Scotsman on the subject of radiation hormesis.In it I challenged anybody to produce real scientific evidence for the alternate LNT theory. This produced such interest that the next day they published 3 separate replies. I will preen by publishing all of them (particularly the first one) in full,
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Further to the excellent letter from Neil Craig (5 April), I must put in a further complaint, about the reporting of the strength of radioactivity. It is always given as a hundred or a thousand times the "recommended" or "safe" or "permitted" dose.

This is totally unacceptable as it is utterly meaningless. For example, the permitted dose for the emissions from our nuclear power stations is 1mSv. There is absolutely solid proof that a dose 500 times that amount produces radiation hormesis, which prevents cancers and improves health.

Robert Pate
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Neil Craig's letter about nuclear contamination (5 April) is short on facts. For example, the Ukrainian health ministry estimates that more than 12,000 deaths have resulted from the Chernobyl incident; radiation-related illnesses have quadrupled since 1986.

Other scientific studies have shown similar results.

There are also deaths not included in the statistics. I know of a number of people who were outdoors when the Chernobyl cloud passed over Scotland. They were healthy people, yet a high proportion of them died from unusual cancers in the years following.

Niall Walker
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Neil Craig writes (5 April) that there is no evidence that low level radiation is bad for you and issues us a challenge to produce some.
Nearly two billion of the present world population will eventually die of cancer. They will have been smoking, using mobile phones, eating junk food, flying at high altitudes, using household cleaners and absorbing background radiation.
It is very difficult to plan an ethical, controlled, accurate experiment to attribute the cancer deaths to any cause.
A 1 per cent error would be 20 million people. However, work by Richardson and Wing on long-term health of workers at Oak Ridge does get close. They found 4.98 per cent increase in mortality per 10mSv for doses received before the age of 45 and a 7.3 per cent increase after that age.

Their report can be found in Environmental Health Perspectives August 1999 and contains 62 references.

Stephen Salter
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Salter has, to his credit, actually attempted to answer the question. The report he quotes exists but, as I point out in my reply, while carefully sidestepping any accusation of deliberate fraud, has not been independently verified and the authors have the statistically impossible record of having been the only people to find such results twice. I replied:

Sir,

I am pleased that my remarks about low level radiation & my challenge to anti-nuclearists to provide actual evidence for the "official" No Lower Threshold theory (LNT) that it is damaging has engendered so many replies (letter Weds).

I thank Robert Pate for his supportive remarks. It is good to know this phenomenon, while unmentioned in government circles, is understood.

Naill Walker, in quoting a Ukrainian government claim as scientific evidence is wrong. Political statements are not science, even from such estimable governments as Ukraine's. That country has received billions of pounds of foreign aid predicated on Chernobyl having been enormously destructive and can hardly be blamed if they hype it more than the facts justify. The UN Chernobyl Forum report is unambiguous that deaths have not exceeded 56. His evidence of people who were living in Scotland at the time and spent some time outdoors over following weeks (who didn't?) & subsequently developed cancer is not even as good anecdotal evidence as that behind the MMR scare - more along the lines of the correlation between bad luck and meeting black cats.

Professor Stephen Salter's case is better. The Oak Ridge study of nuclear workers did indeed claim to find a small positive correlation between radiation and cancers. The same result was found in at the Savannah River nuclear site - and by the same pair of authors.

However I'm sure Professor Salter will agree that, particularly where the evidence is purely statistical, it is easy for subjective error to creep in - just off the top of my head, where death certificates show several possible influences on death choosing which one to count is a subjective matter. A handful of such would have seriously changed the observed trend Under no circumstances can a theory be considered scientifically proven on the basis of 1 piece of research repeated by nobody else. The example of N-Rays which the physicist Blondlot, sincerely believed he had observed statistically, but which are wholly non-existent is one all scientists should be aware of.

This applies in spades where the theory in question, was muscularly adopted by government 35 years before the sole allegedly confirming evidence appeared.

By comparison the evidence for that low level radiation is beneficial (Hormesis) is overwhelming and equally importantly, comes from many unrelated sources.

There are the Taiwanese apartments built with irradiated steel which resulted in cancer among inhabitants being 96.4% below the national average; there is Professor Cohen's wide-ranging study (it includes the whole US population) showing a beneficial correlation between radon in homes and lung cancer of half the deadly correlation with smoking; there are other studies from Sweden and elsewhere with the same results; there is a century's worth of laboratory experiments showing hormesis certainly repeatably works in plants, tissue cultures and guinea pigs, rabbits and mice; there are the many areas of the world where natural background radiation is up to 17 times the "official" safe limit and has been for millions of years, without harm; their are records from generations of British radiologists showing a lower than expected cancer rate; there is evidence that "proponents of the LNT assumption consistently reject, manipulate, and deliberately ignore an overwhelming abundance of published data and falsely claim that no reliable data are available": there is the fact that the million extra cancers the LNT theory predicted for Chernobyl simply hasn't happened: that even the long term history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki contradict the official theory. And the examples go on and on.

Perhaps the most disgraceful abuse of science by the LNT supporters happened to a herd of cows. In 1946 this herd was exposed to an Atomic Bomb test causing visible injury. The US government kept them under examination to see how long it would take them to die. In 1964 they were quietly put to sleep because their survival to, or in some case almost certainly past, the longest known longevity for such creatures, was embarrassingly clear proof LNT was wrong and hormesis correct.

The entire anti-nuclear scare industry depends on the foundation of the no threshold theory. This scare has cost the human race 40 years of inexpensive electricity and at least 19 million lives. It is well past time to face the truth.

That is quite long and I did send several shortened versions down to "Both Naill Walker and Stephen Salter are quite wrong in their criticism of what I said about low level radiation being beneficial & though clearly space here precludes me saying why, you can trust me on it" which they didn't print either. The effect of this is that they have, quite incorrectly, given the impression that Salter's claims are unarguable and scientifically proven - neither of which is true.

I have previously discussed the Press Complaints Council's decision to break their own rules and precedent and state that British journalistic ethical standards do not extend to. when they have published lies, allowing the person named, any chance to report the true facts. Ah well that is British journalism for you. The PPC is funded by and represents the entire British press and therefor it can be seen that there are no circumstances under which they will not make up and maintain any lie whatsoever and thus no circumstances under which anything said by these corrupt child rapists* can be trusted.